Product design · Adsum app · 2022 – 2024
Instant VAT Refunds
UK businesses were waiting weeks for HMRC to pay VAT refunds. At Adsum we designed a product that paid them within the hour. Then testing told us the price was wrong, and the answer became two products instead of one.
- payout target
- 60 min
- fee tiers after testing
- 5% → 2%
- products at launch
- 2
- Company
- Adsum Technologies
- Product
- Adsum app
- My role
- Product designUser researchPrototypingUI design
- Methods
- Interviews with UK business owners · Persona · Ideation · Usability testing with founders, FDs and CFOs · Iteration
OutcomeLaunched as two tiers: Instant VAT Refunds and Funds on HMRC Approval. More customers chose the cheaper second tier, which we hadn’t expected.
Full story: showing every section.
Context
Waiting on HMRC
Adsum is a London fintech that helps UK businesses get quicker access to their tax refunds. I was the founding product designer, and for most of my time there the only one, working across research, Figma and the React front end.
The problem we kept hearing about was VAT. Businesses submit a return, are owed a refund, and then wait. Sometimes a long time, with no clear idea of when the money will land. For a small business that’s not an inconvenience; it’s a cash-flow problem.
Problem
Unreliable, slow, and out of the customer’s control
The main pain point for businesses was the unreliability and length of HMRC’s waiting time for the refund to come back. In a brainstorm at Adsum, the question became: what if we came up with a product that gave the refund back within a guaranteed short time?
Research
What UK business owners told us
We interviewed UK business owners about their frustrations with the VAT refund process. Speed and simplicity were what mattered. Long waiting times came up most (60%), followed by complicated procedures (20%) and a lack of transparency (10%).
From the research we built a persona to design against: Jane August, 33, Financial Director at ABC Limited. Her goal: simple, quick and reliable tax refund processes. Her frustration: long waiting times at HMRC and delayed refunds.
Ideation
Sixty minutes? Ninety? And how do we avoid fraud?
Ideation settled the core idea, Instant VAT, offering VAT refunds within 60 minutes, and raised the questions we had to design answers for. How do we make the process simple and transparent? Should the service be something you switch on and off? And, because we were paying money out before HMRC had, how do we avoid fraud?
The first version
Payout in as little as 60 minutes, for a 5% fee
The first version was one product: Instant VAT Refunds. Payout in as little as 60 minutes, for a simple, transparent fee of 5% plus VAT.
An easy toggle-on, toggle-off service
Instant VAT lives in Settings alongside the connected HMRC account and the bank account we pay into. Switch it on and, next time you’re owed a refund, Adsum pays it within 60 minutes.
Thorough ID verification
Phone number, email address and identity checks before the service activates. This was our first answer to the fraud question.
Read-only access to bank and bookkeeping
Linking the primary business bank account through Open Banking, and the bookkeeping platform, gave us a way to verify the legitimacy of the business without asking for anything we didn’t need.
Usability testing
They loved the speed. They didn’t love the price.
We tested with our target users: founders, finance directors and CFOs of UK-based businesses. People loved the idea of getting their VAT refund back within an hour of submission. The certainty of cash flow and the time benefit were exactly what they wanted.
But many of the people we tested with found the 5% commission too steep a fee for the benefit of the service. That was the finding that mattered.
The decision
Back to the drawing board: two tiers
We went back to the whiteboard. Instant VAT as an umbrella product? Tiered products? A different fee structure, 1% or 2%? We decided to break Instant VAT down into two tiered products, so businesses could choose the trade-off that suited them.
Instant VAT Refunds
Payout in as little as 60 minutes. 5% + VAT. Link your bank via Open Banking and provide your six largest VAT invoices; our VAT experts assess the return for a quick payout. Verification takes up to 24 hours. Maximum time benefit, at a higher price.
Funds on HMRC Approval
Payout instantly on HMRC approval. 2% transaction fee. Little to no verification required, and no Open Banking or bookkeeping link. Refunds reach the business three to five business days earlier than they would from HMRC. Cheaper and less invasive, with a smaller time benefit.
Launch
What happened when it shipped
More customers opted for Funds on HMRC Approval than for Instant VAT Refunds. We didn’t see that coming. The premium product was the idea we started with, and the cheaper tier we added after testing turned out to be the one most businesses wanted.
“A game-changer. It’s very simple, hardly any paperwork. And you get access to your VAT refund straight away.”
“Quick pay-out, once HMRC had approved our VAT return. Would recommend, also very easy to set up.”
“Easy to onboard and quick to activate.”
“Product does exactly what it says, is really convenient and helps speed up the returns and inject cash flow back into the business.”
Reflection
What this taught me
Test the price, not just the screens
The flows tested well. The fee didn’t. If we’d only asked people to complete tasks, we would have shipped one product and missed the one most customers actually chose.
Iteration pays off
Quick prototyping and consistent design kept the experience coherent even as the product split in two. Going back to the whiteboard after testing wasn’t a setback; it was the point of testing.
Cross-functional work and simplicity
The product landed because design, engineering and the VAT specialists worked on it together, and because we kept the experience simple: hardly any paperwork, a toggle, and money arriving sooner.